Soon New Years’ resolutions will begin to be made. It can be fun to declare all of your wishes for the New Year. I used to enjoy the thrill of making make New Years resolutions every December. It was fun to declare all the things I wanted once the calendar changed. Sometimes my friends and I would share them and get each other more excited. But it didn’t feel good as the next year passed and life didn’t happen as I’d hoped, leaving me sad and disappointed.

Many people love making resolutions. It’s fun to think about what you want and decide that when the New Year arrives, things will be different, like the resolution wish fairy will magically make it happen:

These sound wonderful when you state them. Then the year begins. You’d still like those resolutions to come true but as reality hits, you realize there’s no wish fairy and a new year didn’t magically make life different. As time passes and you haven’t lost weight, found the romantic partner, gotten closer the job you want, and happiness still seems like it’s for other people, discouragement sets in. The truth is, if you don’t actively make changes in yourself, it will continue to be hard to bring resolutions to fruition.

By February I’d be frustrated that my resolutions weren’t manifesting. By March I’d completely give up. In December I’d start the process again. I made the same resolutions year after year, hoping each would be my time, until I finally accepted that just making resolutions didn’t work. Many disappointments later, I began to treat myself with more kindness and decided I had to change my own path. After years of neglect, I started to take care of myself in much healthier ways and a funny thing happened—I began to experience self-love for the first time.

It snuck up on me slowly. At first I just enjoyed doing things for me that I’d never done before. The synergy was wonderful! I’d do something special, like make time for exercise or allow myself to buy a more expensive lotion, and it left me feeling good. The more I felt good, the more I was motivated to do things that felt good. The more I paid attention to being kinder to me, the better I felt.

Slowly my commitment to making me feel good changed my self-image. Eventually it blossomed into strong self-love. The more I committed to myself, the more I was motivated to develop healthier habits and a more empowering outlook on life in general. Self-love makes you want to take good care of yourself and do the things necessary to achieve your life goals. When you commit to yourself out of love, you can get more of what you want:

• As you accept your body with love, you’ll want to eat healthier and exercise as a loving act to take care of you, not to please others. Your health can improve and your body will reap the benefits of fitness without the stress of struggling to lose weight.

• The more you love yourself, the more likely you are to let healthy love in and attract satisfying romance without trying. If you don’t love you, why should anyone else?

• Self-love boosts your confidence and makes you want to follow your passions because it feels so good. That motivates you not to settle for any job that you don’t like and to do what’s necessary to find one that you love. Self-love also helps you enjoy your own company, so you can relax about needing someone, which makes you more attractive.

• Committing to yourself feels so good you’ll experience an overall feeling of contentment. So much unhappiness is caused by not being satisfied with who you are. When you love yourself, it’s a happy feeling on its own!

I wasted many years not loving me, making empty resolutions, and being unhappy. I launched The Self-Love Movement™ at http://howdoiloveme.com to give my 13th book, How Do I Love Me? Let Me Count the Ways away for free as a thank you for the incredible blessing of building strong self-love. Since January is Self-Love Month, I also have a pledge you can sign to commit to starting 2013 by with 31 days of doing something self-loving.

I no longer need New Years resolutions. Instead, every year I commit to loving myself more, which gets much better results. Committing to yourself is a much better way to lead yourself down a satisfying path that makes you happy. Treating yourself with kindness puts the focus on you and feels good. Every little loving thing you do for yourself is a brick in foundation of your self-love. That feels much better than another year of unfulfilled resolutions!
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About Lessons from a Recovering Doormat

Welcome to my self-empowerment blog. I used to be a wimp and never got taken seriously. When I became one of the first women to start a record label, I learned to navigate the male dominated music industry and earned respect, without raising my voice or getting overtly tough. I transferred those skills into all areas of life and now get what I want from most people. I'll share those lessons here by talking about my observations of situations and habits that hold both men and women back from being as empowered as possible. I'll also give tips for more effective communication, handling yourself with more confidence, and in general, how to come across as more serious--whether it's at work, dealing with an annoying phone company, your mother, a romantic partner and anyone else you want to feel more in control with. Everybody can use more tools for taking control of their lives, like in my latest book, Nice Girls Can Finish First.

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Daylle Deanna Schwartz

Daylle Deanna Schwartz is a speaker, self-empowerment counselor, best-selling author of 15 books, including Nice Girls Can Finish First (McGraw-Hill), All Men Are Jerks Until Proven Otherwise and founder of The Self-Love Movement™ where she's giving away her 13th book, How Do I Love Me? Let Me Count the Ways, a She's appeared on hundreds of TV and radio shows, including Oprah, Howard Stern, and Good Morning America and has been quoted in dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Chicago Sun-Times, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Marie Claire, and Men¹s Health.

After being a consummate People Pleaser who felt unworthy of getting her own needs met for many years, Daylle found a path of self-love that enabled her to build her self-esteem and reinvent herself into a dual career. She learned to get taken seriously without being overtly assertive when she became one of the first women to start an independent record label (on a dare!) and learned to play ball nicely and successfully in an industry dominated by men. To help independent musicians empower themselves, Daylle writes music business books for Billboard/Random House, including the very popular Start & Run Your Own Record Labe and I Don't Need a Record Deal!

Daylle's books have been translated into over 10 languages and are popular around the world. She speaks for colleges, organizations and corporations. Through her company, Project Self-Empowerment, Daylle creates programs and materials to help people empower themselves. One goal is to raise the money to self-publish her book, How Do I Love Me? Let Me Count the Ways and give it away for free in colleges and through organizations, to give thanks for all her blessings. Daylle uses her writing and speaking to help others find the kind of contentment and empowerment that she has.